4

By the next day, she'd almost managed to convince herself that everything that happened yesterday had been the result of serious stress, lack of sleep, and one entirely real but ultimately explainable incident with a construction frame. People saw all kinds of things in situations like that. The brain was good at filling in gaps with pretty, completely false pictures — she'd read that somewhere once, and she chose to remember the article now instead of the silver line on her skin.

She stopped at a café near the office — not her usual one, but a different one, because her usual place today gave her a vague, unexplainable reluctance to walk in — and was waiting for her order when she noticed a man at the next table.

The café was small and mostly empty at that hour — the morning coffee-break crowd had cleared out, and the evening one hadn't started yet. Outside, a fine, lazy rain was falling, blurring the signs across the street into watercolor smears, and a low wash of jazz drifted from the speaker over the counter — something no one here, it seemed, had ever chosen on purpose, just put on once, long ago, and never changed. In an atmosphere like this, it was easy to believe nothing out of the ordinary could possibly happen: too cozy, too much like an average afternoon, thick with the smell of cinnamon and wet asphalt.

He was looking at her.

Not the way men usually looked at her in cafés — not appraising, not fleeting. He was watching with something closer to shock, all but forgetting the cup in front of him, like someone who'd just spotted the last person on earth he expected to run into, here, in this city, at this table.

Alice was walking past with her tray when he said — quietly, almost to himself, but clearly enough that she heard it:

"That's not possible."

She stopped.

"Excuse me?"

He looked straight into her eyes — and for a second his expression changed, as if he'd seen something there he wasn't supposed to see in the eyes of a random woman in a random café. For one brief instant, something flickered in his eyes — eyes that had been entirely unremarkable a moment before — a faint silvery shimmer, there and gone, as if it had never been.

"Nothing," he said.

"You just stared at me for a full minute and said 'that's not possible,'" Alice pointed out, setting her tray down on her own table but not sitting. "Usually, after that, people at least come up with a convincing lie. You could've said I look like your ex. That one works almost every time."

The corner of his mouth twitched — almost a smile, but not quite.

"You're right," he said. "I should've prepared something in advance."

He was already getting up, already reaching for his jacket, everything about him signaling that the conversation was over before it had really started. But before he walked out, he turned back once more and said, low, almost casually, the way you'd remind someone to grab an umbrella:

"If you start seeing water in your dreams — don't go near it."

And he left without waiting for an answer.

Alice made it to the window just in time to watch him cross the street without looking back and disappear into the flow of pedestrians as casually as if he hadn't said a word in the last two minutes. No cab, no sudden movement, not even one glance behind him — just the steady, confident stride of a man who knew how to leave in a way that never looked like fleeing. Alice watched him until he turned the corner and was gone, and only then realized she'd never asked his name. Though something told her he wouldn't have answered anyway. She stood there another few seconds by the window, cup still in hand, honestly trying to come up with something to say to a warning like that, before deciding the most sensible thing was to chalk the stranger up as a little unhinged.

The city was big, people were strange, and mysterious men issuing cryptic warnings in cafés were probably something every woman ran into at least once in her life — she'd simply never been that woman before now.

She finished her coffee, got through the rest of the day, went home, had dinner — and only as she was falling asleep did she catch herself replaying that line about the water, stuck in her head like a song she couldn't shake, catchy and entirely unwelcome.

*Don't go near it,* Alice thought, drifting off.

She had no intention to. She had exactly zero plans to go anywhere near any body of water tonight.

Her plans, however, had been listening to her less and less these days.

She lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the pipes sigh through the wall and the occasional car pass on the street below — the sounds of a perfectly ordinary night, which tonight, for some reason, felt oddly fragile, as if they could be swapped out for something else the instant she kept her eyes closed a beat too long. At some point the line between listening and seeing dissolved so quietly that Alice couldn't have said, afterward, at exactly what second the ordinary dark of her bedroom turned into a different kind of dark altogether.